Anonymity, privacy -- these are things we have come to expect when it comes to our cell phones. The last thing people anticipate is for unknown -- possibly malicious -- third parties to able to quickly track our positions every time we place a phone call.

They then conducted two attacks geared at tracking the victim's position. The attacks were conducted in Europe on a number of real-world networks, across various carriers.

The researchers used a so-called "paging attack" -- a denial-of-service (DOS) type attack that involves tricking basestations or mobile devices into an always "ready" state. By sending a TMSI (Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity) which appeared to contain a static IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity), the attacker tricked the victim device into giving up its real IMSI.

That in turn allowed the target to be continuously tracked within a monitored region.

A second route to monitoring was also demonstrated, which used an Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol attack. The target device returns a Mac error, while the rest of the devices would respond with a different error -- a synchronization error.

The authors write, "The captured authentication request can now be replayed by the adversary each time he wants to check the presence of [a device] in a particular area. In fact, thanks to the error messages, the adversary can distinguish any mobile station from the one the authentication request was originally sent to."

The caveat here is that the attackers first had to indentify example authentication requests by calling the victim's device. But they argue that the flaw could still be abused in certain scenarios, such as if a boss wanted to track employees in a large office building.

The researchers elaborate, "[The employer] would first use the femtocell to sniff a valid authentication request. This could happen in a different area than the monitored one. Then the employer would position the device near the entrance of the building. Movements inside the building could be tracked as well by placing additional devices to cover different areas of the building. If devices with wider area coverage than a femtocell are used, the adversary should use triangulation to obtain finer position data."

II. Fixing the Flaws

So what does all of this mean?? 3G networks -- any 3G network, according to the authors -- are vulnerable to tampering which allows their users to be tracked, due to protocol weaknesses.

The IMSI paging attack flaw seems to be the more dangerous attack as it can be used to track anonymous victims.

Fortunately, there's a fix to both problems. The fix is to both modify the error messages, and adopt certain protocol changes. Those changes would involve introducing a so-called "unlikability" session key to weed out malicious AKA requests, and to implement IMSI paging procedure fixes to prevent the DOS trickery.

The 3G mobile industry's security watchdog, 3GPP, is investigating the proof-of-concept attacks and is considering the proposed fixes, which the authors argue would have a "low... computational and economical cost". Those fixes could (in theory) be rolled out in coming months to prevent attackers from exploiting "in the wild" the soon-to-be-published flaw.

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Your device more than likely does absolutely nothing to stop those signals. Unless it's a box with atleast 5" of metal on all sides, it's not going to be guaranteed to have enough isolation to keep your phone from making contact. And that's just the beginning.

I can't believe that people actually try to sell shit like this and keep a clean conscience.

Or, you can achieve the same exact effect for free by turning on "Airplane Mode" (which basically switches off all the phone's antennas) and (if you're especially paranoid) also switching off the GPS location service by default (and turning it on only when you actually need to use it.) I do the latter as a matter of course, because it saves battery.

Gods, you must feel awesome about yourself, peddling useless product to rubes who don't know any better...

quote: Anonymity, privacy -- these are things we have come to expect when it comes to our cell phones

Come on Jason... who really expects that? I mean I guess we SHOULD expect it, but the reality of what we have is that anonymity and privacy are 2 things I feel I totally give up by using a cell phone, or more specifically a smart phone.

quote: Come on Jason... who really expects that? I mean I guess we SHOULD expect it, but the reality of what we have is that anonymity and privacy are 2 things I feel I totally give up by using a cell phone, or more specifically a smart phone.

And that's why a lot of people avoid smartphones... I agree they're a big security risk. I use one, and a lot of people do, but I know some people who specifically ONLY use 3G feature phones for the added anonymity/privacy.

Those are the kind of folks who I'd imagine would be most perturbed by developments such as this. :-)

have you ever looked at the cost of a regular contract vs. a smartphone contract?

better yet, have you ever looked at the cost of a pre-paid phone vs. the cost of a smartphone?

i'm sorry, but the reason i haven't migrated to a smartphone isn't technophobia. and concerns over privacy are relevant, but not primary. the real reason is because i've spent less for my pre-paid phone (including the cost of the phone itself)--this year--than i would have paid for 2 months of a smartphone contract.

i work in front of a computer all day..it's not like i can't google stuff when i need to. heck, even if i didn't work in front of a pc, i'd be writing stuff down (or making a voice memo) and looking it up when i got home.

i just loaded another 15 euro on my phone and it'll last me a good 2 months or so. texts are cheap.

I live outside the largest city in Vermont (Burlington) on Verizon and I would say 90%+ of the time I can't get a 4g signal on my phone. If i can it's usually on an extremely localized feed near a specific location.

I find it hard to quantify this as 4g coverage. . .so don't be ignorant of 3g issues, you'd be surprised how many it will continue to affect for years.

How do you think a phone call gets charged to your bill and you even receive a CELL phone call in the 1st place.

Easy enough right, cell towers. Cell towers triangulate and your phone sends signal out for discovery, similar concept the the old days of televisions getting the TV signal over the air via rabbit ears, just now it goes 2 way vs 1 way receiver.

You dont have to have any gps or so called air plane mode, once a cell phone makes use of any data and cell towers in the area pick up the signals and know where you are.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer